Knee Osteoarthritis and Viscosupplementation: The Evolving Treatment Trend

Osteoarthritis is one of the most common degenerative joint diseases especially among elderly population. Deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of the nature of the disease helped the scientist to come up with new treatment options and trends. Osteoarthritis is a very common progressive chronic degenerative joint disease with the main pathology being destruction of joint cartilage, inflammation of the synovial membrane or sclerosis of the underlying bone. The main goal in treatment is pain reduction and halting the disease progression. The viscosupplementation therapy has been in use during the last decade, and helps the patients with both pain reduction and halting the disease progression by different mechanisms such as inducing endogenous hyaluronic acid production, inflammation suppression and reduction of the degradation of the cartilage. This study is a review study on the safety and efficacy of viscosupplementation therapy and a brief literature review in this field. Although intra articular injection of viscosupplementations has been showed safety and efficacy especially through 26 weeks of the initiation of treatment, but controversy in regard of using this system is still questionable. Despite of controversy, it can delay the surgical intervention in knee osteoarthritis and can be considered as a good alternative for long-term therapy and for pain reduction and joint function improvement.